Person:
Evans, David K.

Africa Chief Economist’s Office

Fields of Specialization

Education, Social Development

ORCID

0000-0001-5413-9284

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Africa Chief Economist’s Office

Last updated: March 28, 2024

Biography

Bio: David is a Lead Economist in the Chief Economist's Office for the Africa Region of the World Bank. He coordinates impact evaluation work across sectors for the Africa Region. In the past, he worked as Senior Economist in the Human Development Department in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region of the World Bank, and as an economist designing and implementing impact evaluations in Africa. He has designed and implemented impact evaluations in agriculture, education, health, and social protection, in Brazil, the Gambia, Kenya, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. He has taught economic development at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and he holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 41

How to Improve Education Outcomes Most Efficiently? A Comparison of 150 Interventions Using the New Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling Metric
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Angrist, Noam; Evans, David K.; Filmer, Deon; Glennerster, Rachel; Rogers, F. Halsey; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. Some studies report changes in years of schooling; others report changes in learning. Standard deviations, the metric typically used to report learning gains, measure gains relative to a local distribution of test scores. This metric makes it hard to judge if the gain is worth the cost in absolute terms. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) -- which combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard -- as a new metric for reporting gains from education interventions. The paper applies LAYS to compare the effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness, where cost is available) of interventions from 150 impact evaluations across 46 countries. The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.
Property Tax Compliance in Tanzania: Can Nudges Help?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-08) Collin, Matthew Edward; Di Maro, Vincenzo; Evans, David K.; Manang, Frederik
Low tax compliance in low- and middle-income countries around the world limits the ability of governments to offer effective public services. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text message campaign aimed at promoting tax compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Landowners were randomly assigned to one of four groups designed to test different aspects of tax morale. They received a simple text message reminder to pay their tax (a test of salience), a message highlighting the connection between taxes and public services (reciprocity), a message communicating that people who did not pay were not contributing to local or national development (social pressure), or no message (control). Recipients of any message were 18 percent (or 2 percentage points) more likely to pay any property tax by the end of the study period. Each type of message resulted in gains in payment rates, although social pressure messages delivered the lowest gains. Total payment amounts were highest for those who received reciprocity messages. Nudges were most effective in areas with lower initial rates of tax compliance. The average estimated benefit-cost ratio across treatments is 36:1 due to the low cost of the intervention, with higher cost-effectiveness for reciprocity messages.
Cash Transfers, Trust, and Inter-household Transfers: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-01-24) Evans, David K.; Kosec, Katrina
Institutionalized conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs may affect pre-existing, informal safety nets such as inter-household transfers and trust among community members. This study reports on a randomized controlled trial used to test the impact of CCTs on various measures of trust and informal safety nets within communities in Tanzania. It provides evidence that the introduction of a CCT program increased program beneficiaries’ trust in other community members and their perceived ability to access support from other households (e.g., childcare). Although CCTs reduced the total size of transfers to beneficiary households in the community in the short run (after 1.75 years of transfers), that reduction had disappeared 2.75 years after transfers began. Taken together, this evidence suggests that formal CCT programs do not necessarily crowd out informal safety nets in the longer term, and they may in fact boost trust and support across households.
Teacher Professional Development around the World: The Gap between Evidence and Practice
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-04) Popova, Anna; Evans, David K.; Breeding, Mary E.; Arancibia, Violeta; Breeding, Mary E.
Many teachers in low- and middle-income countries lack the skills to teach effectively, and professional development (PD) programs are the principal tool that governments use to upgrade those skills. At the same time, few PD programs are evaluated, and those that are evaluated show highly varying results. This paper proposes a set of indicators—the In-Service Teacher Training Survey Instrument—to standardize reporting on teacher PD programs. An application of the instrument to 33 rigorously evaluated PD programs shows that programs that link participation to career incentives, have a specific subject focus, incorporate lesson enactment in the training, and include initial face-to-face training tend to show higher student learning gains. In qualitative interviews, program implementers also report follow-up visits as among the most effective characteristics of their professional development programs. This paper then uses the instrument to present novel data on a sample of 139 government-funded, at-scale professional development programs across 14 countries. The attributes of most at-scale teacher professional development programs differ sharply from those of programs that evidence suggests are effective, with fewer incentives to participate in PD, fewer opportunities to practice new skills, and less follow-up once teachers return to their classrooms.
Building State Capacity: What Is the Impact of Development Projects?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Di Maro, Vincenzo; Evans, David K.; Khemani, Stuti; Scot, Thiago
Although research has established the importance of state capacity in economic development, less is known about how to build that capacity and the role of external partners in the process. This paper estimates the impact of a typical development project designed to build state capacity in a low-income country. Specifically, it evaluates a multilateral development bank project in Tanzania, which incentivized investments in local state capacity by offering grants conditional on institutional performance scores. The paper uses a difference-in-differences methodology to estimate the project impact, comparing outcomes between 18 project and 22 non-project local governments over 2016–18. Outcomes were measured through two rounds of primary surveys of nearly 500 local government officials and nearly 3,000 households. Over the course of the project, measured state capacity improved in project areas, but due to comparable gains in non-project areas, the project’s value-added to change in state capacity is estimated to be zero across all the dozens of relevant variables in the surveys. The data suggest that state capacity is evolving in Tanzania through endogenous changes in trust and legitimacy in the country rather than from financial incentives offered by external partners.
Education Technology for Effective Teachers
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-02-01) Evans, David K.
Education systems around the world are investing in technology to help teachers be more effective. In some cases, the results are exciting. In others, the impact of technology falls short of expectations or remains unevaluated. The closing of schools worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding how to leverage technology well. This note lays out four principles for investing in technology for effective teachers and six aspects of teaching where technology can boost teacher performance, together with examples of tested, promising, and cautionary experiences with teacher technologies.
Economic and Social Development along the Urban-Rural Continuum: New Opportunities to Inform Policy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08) Cattaneo, Andrea; Adukia, Anjali; Brown, David L.; Christiaensen, Luc; Evans, David K.; Haakenstad, Annie; McMenomy, Theresa; Partridge, Mark; Vaz, Sara; Weiss, Daniel J.
The economic and social development of nations relies on their population having physical access to services and employment opportunities. For the vast majority of the 3.4 billion people living in rural locations, this largely depends on their access to urban centers of different sizes. Similarly, urban centers depend on their rural hinterlands. Building on the literature on functional areas/territories and the rural-urban continuum as well as insights from central place theory, this review paper advances the notion of catchment areas differentiated along an urban-to-rural continuum to capture these urban-rural interconnections. It further shows how a new, publicly available data set operationalizing this concept can shed new light on policy making across a series of development fields, including institutions and governance, urbanization and food systems, welfare and poverty, and access to health and education services. Together the insights support a more geographically nuanced perspective on development.
The State of Ceara in Brazil is a Role Model for Reducing Learning Poverty
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Loureiro, Andre; Cruz, Louisee; Lautharte, Ildo; Evans, David K.
This report presents the case of the state of Ceara in Brazil that overcame adverse socioeconomic conditions to substantially improve education outcomes with efficient use of resources. Despite having the 5th lowest GDP per capita among the 26 Brazilian states, the 9-million-inhabitant state of Ceara has experienced the largest increase in the national education quality index in both primary and lower secondary education since 2005, with 10 municipalities of Ceara being among the top 20 national ranking, including Sobral which has the highest score. The state of Ceara pioneered the use of results-based financing as part of a comprehensive education reform program that among other elements included strong support to its municipalities to achieve universal literacy by the end of grade 2. The reforms allowed the state to considerably improve learning levels of students in primary and lower secondary education with a high level of efficiency in the use of resources. The main aspects of the reforms are presented and discussed.
TV-Based Learning in Bangladesh: Is it Reaching Students?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07-16) Biswas, Kumar; Asaduzzaman, T.M.; Evans, David K.; Fehrler, Sebastian; Ramachandran, Deepika; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Is TV-based learning during COVID-19 school closures in Bangladesh reaching students? Most students (86 percent) within our sample of more than 2,000 Grade 9 stipend recipients are aware of government provided TV-based learning programs; yet only half of the students with access to these programs choose to access them. Also, very few students (21 percent) have access to government provided online learning programs, and among those that do, only about 2 percent choose to access them. There is a perceptible decline in the time students spend studying at home after school closures. This may be linked to the fact that 1 in 2 parents claim they are unable to help their children with new topics. Despite lower education, mothers are significantly more likely to be involved in the child’s education compared to fathers. Most students (90 percent) claim they have a supportive environment at home for studying. This is true for both boys and girls. Finally, nearly 65 percent of households in our sample report declines in income and 28 percent had to decrease the amount of food consumed within the household in the previous week.
Are Teachers in Africa Poorly Paid? Evidence from 15 Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08) Yuan, Fei; Evans, David K.; Filmer, Deon
Pay levels for public sector workers—and especially teachers—are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while simple comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high. This study presents data on teacher pay from 15 African countries, along with five comparator countries from other regions. The results suggest that in several (seven) countries, teachers' monthly salaries are lower than other formal sector workers with comparable levels of education and experience. However, in all of those countries, teachers report working significantly fewer hours than other workers, so that their hourly wage is higher. Teachers who report fewer hours are no more likely to report holding a second job, although teachers overall are nearly two times more likely to hold a second job than other workers. With higher national incomes, the absolute value of teacher salaries rises, but they fall as a percentage of income per capita. The study explores variation across types of teacher contracts, the association between teacher pay and student performance, and the association between teacher pay premia and other aspects of economies.